Oops! I spoke out!

Assertion: Online auction site feedback systems do not (in general) reflect the way things work in the real world and are therefore flawed — and unfair.

Supporting (all too common) scenario …

You buy a misrepresented product from an online auction site. Specifically, the sales text claims the product is fully compatible with all XYZ’s.

The product arrives, is well made, of evident high quality and in good condition. But it immediately becomes clear that it, in fact, cannot possibly be used with your XYZ. Let’s say that it’s a large, circular object and your XYZ is a fine representation of the proverbial small, square hole. Clearly, the seller has made a mistake. (Or have they?)

You notify the seller of the problem by private email, politely, who responds by denying your (absolutely undeniably obvious and accurate) claim, saying that it’s your fault for, “not knowing how to use the product”. They offer no advice as to how to use it, however — presumably because by this point, they must know that it is indeed impossible. But who knows. Maybe they’re just a bit slow?

So, you try once more to convince them, supplying associated evidence, carefully explaining the (obvious) details as to why the circle won’t fit in the square hole, as it were.

Alas, once more, the seller just (sort of politely) blames you for not knowing how to use the product correctly. “I can assure you that this gadget does fit in an XYZ’s square hole. We’ve sold hundreds of them and never had a complaint before.” This time, they offer to be a nice seller by refunding your purchase money — conveniently forgetting that you would have to pay the shipping cost for return, not to mention all the hassle involved.

(You decide not to bother, because you’ve already paid $5 shipping for the $14 item and value your time and money too much to be stupid about it. Instead, you opt to resell the otherwise fine gadget on the same auction site, this time clearly stating its true nature.)

Having given up on the seller’s ability to be reasonable (or sufficiently intelligent to understand the difference between two shapes?) you try to warn others by posting negative feedback stating, “The seller made inaccurate claims as to the product’s compatibility. It is not compatible with XYZ as they claim. The seller refused to acknowledge this fact (twice) and instead blamed the buyer for ‘not knowing how to use’ the product correctly.”

Missing the point entirely — that they are essentially lying to all who stumble upon their listing for this product in the future — the seller responds by giving you negative feedback, “Buyer not happy with product. Offered a refund. Buyer refused. This buyer is trouble. Do not trade!”

So then, you got yourself burned by a seller and tried to warn others. For your troubles, you got burned again — indelibly. Your once perfect trading record with this auction site is no more, because you simply dared to speak out to warn others about this rogue seller. The auction site’s staff were no help. All they could offer was to mediate the disagreement via email. But neither the seller or the buyer are going to budge.

Conclusion? Online auction site feedback systems are clearly flawed. If  the above scenario were to be played out in the real world, then you might now be required to walk around with a warning sign on your forehead saying, “Bad customer! BEWARE!” — and all at the sole discretion of the seller.

Your only other option would be to do what most intelligent auction site users seem to resolve to do, which is to let the, ‘big bad seller’ get away with wasting people’s time, money and effort through blatant misrepresentation of merchandise, all for the sake of maintaining a nice, pretty, 100% positive feedback. After all, every one knows that placing negative feedback against a seller will almost certainly result in reflected negative feedback, regardless of the facts and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Label me a martyr if you will, but I decided to stand on principal and wear the sign on my forehead.

I am now forever labelled, a “Bad Customer!” Shame on me! Long live truth! (And justice?)

 

HEADS UP

Unfortunately, the new Belkin Play Max that we thought was the Bee’s knees (compared to the frustrating problems encountered with the Apple AirPort Extreme last week) has turned out to have crazy problems of its own! *sigh*

The new Belkin Play Max appears to have a serious issue in supporting basic UDP protocol (and possibly other things) via its built-in Ethernet switch.

This first showed up for me when my “Teleport” program (Mac-to-Mac KM remote control) stopped working directly after installing the Belkin and using it as the main hub for our home network. At the time, I didn’t see the correlation with the Belkin and set the issue aside in my ever-overflowing, “too hard for now” bin.

A few days later though, I realized that Apple Home Sharing (iTunes etc) wasn’t working, though it had been doing so flawlessly, for months.

Long story short, switching the network back to a spare D-Link Gigabit switch fixed the problem, with both Home Sharing and Teleport! Switching back to the Belkin broke it all again. Bear in mind that this should not be involving ANY routing what-so-ever — just basic Ethernet switching on the local LAN.

I’ve done this switching around several times, just because I could and got exactly the same result every time. I can just stare at iTunes and watch the shared libraries come and go — and Teleport work, then stop working — , as I change cables, without restarting anything.  I have also tested restarting both software and power-cycling machines though, just to be doubly sure if what I’m seeing. In fact, I spent half the day on this issue.

All other networking seems to be working OK, which is pretty weird I guess, considering!

The only thing in common between Home Sharing and Teleport seems to be the use of the UDP protocol — as incredibly unlikely as that may seem, especially at only the physical layer. In fact, this actually suggests that there’s some kind of inadvertent packet filtering taking place in the Belkin. (The firewall is switched off.) But why would the firewall/router even be involved at the physical ether-switch level? That’s something only Belkin can answer I suppose.

Suspecting a (barely) possible issue at the Gigabit Ethernet level — maybe something around “gigabit jumbo frames”, which is often not supported by cheap switches — I tried forcing all the related network interfaces down to 100baseTX. But that made no difference.

So I’m afraid there’s a serious flaw in this unit, somewhere, somehow. I’m hoping its actually a firmware correctable problem and that a fix for it comes soon. But I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, there’s at least one other person having trouble with Home Sharing, using a Belkin router (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13216871). There’s others with the same problem using different brands in that thread too, so I guess this example is in no way conclusive.

I should point out that the problem with Home Sharing does NOT occur if all computers involved are connecting via the Belkin’s Wi-Fi interface. The problem only appears when cabled, Ethernet is in use — by ANY device trying to access or provide Home Sharing data on the network — and that also includes a second LinkSys WRT54g Wi-Fi access point, connected to an Ethernet port on the back of the Belkin Play Max. Naturally, the same AP works just fine if connected together with the other computers on the test D-Link ether-switch.

To help Google help you find this article, I should mention a few names I’ve come up for this scenario, search query names like, “multiple unwanted drive mappings”, and “windows multiple duplicate drive mappings” or even, “windows many cloned drive maps fault”.

Foreword

None of the stuff in this article actually worked out in the end. Seems that underneath all the eye candy, Windows is still uselessly poor where it counts. Save yourself a lifetime of hassle and switch to Mac. You’ll never look back. That said …

The Story

A long, long time ago, I remember having a strange problem under Windows XP with Office 97. Machines around the office would have a single drive mapping to a samba network share — say, something like …

\\server\homedir (H:)

After booting, if I opened Windows Explorer soon enough, I’d see just that one mapping, as expected. Then, if I just sat there, doing nothing but staring at ‘Explorer, after a minute or so, that same mapping would start duplicating itself under every avaialble drive letter. Something like …

\\server\homedir (E:)
\\server\homedir (F:)
\\server\homedir (G:)
\\server\homedir (H:)
\\server\homedir (I:)
\\server\homedir (J:)
... all the way down to ...
\\server\homedir (Z:)

Back then, it took ages to find the cause, which turned out to be some kind of bug in the Office 97 ‘parasite’ program, FindFast — a file indexer meant to make finding stuff quicker, which it actually did do, reasonably well, I guess. (Who on Earth forgets where they saved things though? :p) Completely removing FindFast made the problem go away back then and I hadn’t paid it the slightest thought over the ten plus years hence. (Never came across it again either, oddly enough!)

Fast-forward several major service packs of Windows XP, through Windows Vista (yikes!) and all the way up to Windows 7 (with the latest service packs as at 2011-01-01) and we find that, in true-to-themselves Microsoft form, the SAME fault still exists in the Windows7 buil-it Indexer service today. AMAZING, yet somehow not surprising. (I converted to Apple Mac as soon as they went Intel under BSD Unix — after some 20 years of Windows’ psych0-trauma’ing. To think — I used to actually believe that bugs like this were just an unavoidable part of owning a computer. I’m much wiser now though! :p)

Granted, this is one of those faults that seems to hardly ever show up anywhere on the planet — unless M$ have a secret pact with Google to remove all mention of it, somehow. But it’s not completely unheard of. I did manage to find ONE solitary post on the topic, from back in 2004 I think. Heck — it might even have be from me. (Don’t think so.)

So the fix under Windows7?

Go to the Control Panel, change the view to anything but ‘by Category’ and locate Indexing Options icon. Activate that and click the Modify button, lower left of the resulting window. Remove the tick from checkbox alongside Offline Files. (Searching for files you can’t even access? What’s with that anyway?) Problem solved.

I have to admit that I was quite astonished when this stab in the dark actually did cure the fault. Since I’ve been living with it for months (in a virtual machine I use for PCB design under Windows) and only just finally came up with this brain-storm-fluke of an idea, I thought I’d better blog about it somewhere, in hopes others with the problem can learn the answer too. Hope it helped … and that my sarcastic, cynical banter wasn’t too bad a thing to endure.

Oh no!

The problem came back. It no longer happened “just on its own”, as mentioned above. But some programs seemed to trigger it to happen again after opening the Choose File dialog box.

Suspecting the possibility of residual index data from before I disabled ‘Offline Files’ indexing, I click the Advanced button in the Index Options window and then the button to delete and rebuild the index. So far, the problem has not come back again. Yay \o/

I suppose that disabling the indexing service altogether (don’t know how in Win7 yet) might be the ultimate fix. But it seems a little ‘sledge hammer’ to me.

I Give Up

OK. I give up. It came back again the next morning. If you stumbled upon this post and did eventually find a permanent cure for this ancient incurable Windows BS bug … please do let me know by way of a comment. Thanks.

ER9x-gruvin Firmware Release 2010-11-11

I’ve made a few changes/additions to my ER9X firmware.

Feature 1 — Keypad auto-repeat delay

The standard ER9X firmware (and the original TH9X version) do not wait a while before commencing key/button auto-repeat. Hence, if you hold a button down just a tiny bit too long, you end up going two or three ‘clicks’. This frustrated me, so I added a longer initial delay, as we’re used to having on PC keyboards etc.

Feature 2 — Better beeps and buzzes

If you have a stock Turnigy/iMax 9X you like to rave about, I’ll bet you don’t mention the hideously annoying/ear-piercing buzzer/beeper thingy!

And, if you’re planning on following my Fr-Sky telemetry additions, you’ll probably be wanting various different tones frequencies/tunes instead of the stock high-pitched squeal for every event.

My solution was to disconnect the stock ‘screamer’ and replace it with a miniature speaker — WITH A 4.7uF CAPACITOR in series. The capacitor is needed to prevent damaging your CPU and/or wasting battery power. I got my ‘speaker’ out of some old budget headphones.

To make it work, I’ve written code to implement “beeps” of any desired length and at lots of different frequencies. So, I can now have long, high pitched tones or short, low pitched tones — or even complete tunes like, ‘Knees up mother brown!’, if I want .

All this will come in handy when I have my AoA (Angle of Attack) sensor and telemetry feedback for ‘always perfect’ landings … or at least, such is the goal. I plan to use tones similar to the rise/sink sounder in modern gliders, and probably a plug-in earphone.

The version I’m posting today has all present tones the same frequency (lower!) and at the same durations as the original ER9X firmware. It  works so well that I’ve actually turned ‘key beeps’ back on. Much more pleasant to the ear now.

The Code

[This code is based on ER9X trunk, release 262]

Pre-compiled HEX

The file er9x-hex-gruvin-20101111.zip contains four pre-build hex files ready for flashing. Their names include the features they contain. The names are …

er9x-frsky-rptdelay-speaker.hex
er9x-frsky-rptdelay.hex
er9x-std-rptdelay.hex
er9x-std-rptdelay-speaker.hex

NOTE: The two FRSKY versions require that you re-wire stuff inside your 9X. “std” means “standard” or “not Fr-Sky”.

If you have a stock ’9X and you just want the better keypad auto-repeat delay, use er9x-std-rptdelay.hex.

Source Code

My complete source code for this version can be found in the following file: src-gruvin-20101111.zip

There are two new make directives for turning on and off the new features. They are:

BEEPER -- values can be BUZZER (the default) or SPEAKER
KEYRPT -- values can be STD (the default) or DELAY

Example make usage to include both features, as well as Fr-Sky support …

make EXT=FRSKY BEEPER=SPEAKER KEYRPT=DELAY

The Future

As time goes on, I may end up as a submitter for the ER9X project itself. However, if I start adding lots of custom features, I’ll probably fork off with my own project – Groovy9X I suppose . Time will tell.

Speaker / Capacitor Installation

Correction to the above — you can’t actually simply “replace” the stock beeper with a speaker. The image below shows what I actually did. (The capacitor is installed the wrong way around too by the way. Negative should ideally go toward the white speaker wire.)

click for full-size

All the best RC remote control stuff is in the 2.4GHz band now. That makes 2.4GHz video senders a no-no for on board your aircraft. Unfortunately, 900MHz is out too, because it essentially cannot be used legally in most countries at practical power levels without at least a Ham license, and even then nothing appears available that even transmits in the licensed Ham bands. And even if that were overcome, 900MHz is still far to close to 2.4GHz and will still overload the RC receiver circuitry anyway. (Video senders have relatively high output power and MUCH higher power density than RC signals.)

You might think, “Fine, I’ll just use an old 72MHz or 40MHz ‘long antenna’ RC remote controller. Fine. But … you’re going to potentially anger other RC aircraft users when your 2.4GHz, 1,000mW video transmitter, possibly miles away, shoots down their plane(s). And, if there’s other RC operators in your area, you’re going to experience video corruption on your downlink anyway.

So 2.4GHz and 900MHz video links just don’t make sense any more.

Understanding that first, I Googled briefly and came across this product in the 5.8GHz band. I have no idea if it’s the best available or even how well it works in practice. But it looks pretty sweet to me, just at a glance. Not cheap but.